The main goal of this specialization is to provide the knowledge and practical skills necessary to develop a strong foundation on information visualization and to design and develop advanced applications for visual data analysis.
This course aims at introducing fundamental knowledge for information visualization. The main goal is to provide the students with the necessary “vocabulary” to describe visualizations in a way that helps them reason about what designs are appropriate for a given problem. This module also gives a broad overview of the field of visualization, introducing its goals, methods and applications.
A learner with some or no previous knowledge in Information Visualization will get a sense of what visualization is, what it is for and in how many different situations it can be applied; will practice to describe data in a way that is useful for visualization design; will familiarize with fundamental charts to talk about the concept of visual encoding and decoding.

Taught By

Enrico Bertini

Associate Professor

Cristian Felix

PhD. Candidate

Transcript

Now, I want to show you another example to describe the same concept in a different way. This example consists in a game. So, you have to play a game and this game is called The Game of 15. Let's see how this game works. In the Game of 15, the pieces for the game are the nine digits, one two three four five six seven eight and nine. Each player takes a digit in turn and once a digit is taken, it can be used by the other player. The first player to get three digits that sum to 15, wins. So, here is a sample game. Player A takes eight, player B takes two. Then A takes four and B takes three. A takes five. Now a question, suppose you are now to step in and play for B, what move would you make? So, stop here for a moment and think about what would be your next move. Now, let's play a different game. This one is the children's game called Tic-Tac-Toe. I suppose many of you are already familiar with this game. How does it work? Well, players alternately plays a not or the symbol O or across in one of nine spaces arranged in a rectangular array like the one that you see in the image. Once a space has been taken, it cannot be changed by either player. The first player to get three symbols in a straight line, wins. Now, suppose player A is X and B is O and the game has reached the state that you see in this image, a question for you, suppose you are now to step in and play a no for B, what move will you make? Once again, I'll give you a few seconds to think about it. So, you may have noticed that the second game is easier to play than the first game. Is even easier to describe, right? So, it turns out that these two games are exactly the same and this concept is called problem Isomorph, an idea that has been developed by Nobel Prize winner, Herbert Simon. If you look at this array, this is the array that I've shown to you to describe the tic-tac-toe game and I put the numbers that we use in the Game of 15 in the cells of this array. Now, if you think about it, playing tic-tac-toe and the Game of 15 is exactly the same thing. Because every time you are able to fill out a row, a column or a diagonal, the sum of the numbers is 15. But again, playing the game in tic-tac-toe is much easier than in the Game of 15. Why is that? Once again, because in the second example in the second game, we have some visual representation that helps us store some of the information in the world rather than having all this information in our mind. Ultimately, this makes reasoning about the problem much easier.

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